Internet memes

Over the years, I’ve seen quite a number of memes with ridiculous claims:

1. Hotmail plans to charge for their services unless you send this email out to all your contacts!
2. MSN/ICQ/AOL will start charging for their services unless you send this IM to all your contacts!
3. A child abductor was spotted in a white van cruising around local schools, email this to ALL your contacts!

Whenever I see these things being passed around, several things concern me:

1. The lack of fact-checking involved when accepting information from peers.
2. The lack of business understand from the general public.
3. People’s perception that they can incite drastic, monumental change by pressing a button, passing an email or joining a Facebook group.

Advertising and charity

There has been a number of different marketing and advertising agencies using charity as a means to gather impressions. Make no mistake; this is an extremely dangerous method of marketing. The most recent campaign I’ve seen consisted of a company offering to give families in Africa clean drinking water provided you join their Facebook group.

The question to ask is:

1.) Is your audience smart enough to differentiate advertising from charity?
2.) If they *are* smart enough, how will this affect the brand? Will such a campaign help tarnish it?

Screen resolutions

I’ve been having discussions with my coworkers about screen resolutions and I think it's quite unanimous that screen resolutions will get bigger as time goes on. That is, it will increase for desktop computers. Yet, upon further analysis, there is also another argument that is progressively clear: we have no idea *how* a user will browse web pages as time passes. We recognize screen resolutions on desktop computers will increase, but will desktops be the predominant method of accessing the internet? Apple’s iPad, HP Slate and even cheap netbooks are in high demand. In five years time, how certain are you that you’ll be viewing websites from a desktop computer?

The website that took over my computer

Practically every creative director I’ve come across seems to have this fixation on full-screen, Flash-based marketing websites. I don’t disagree with how immersive a full-screen site can be, but there is one rule that I feel needs to be addressed: don’t alienate the user.

I visited a website recently and upon landing on the homepage, the site’s full-screen video immediately initialized, encompassing the entire screen, disorienting me and ensuring that I no longer have control of my own computer. Not only was this upsetting, I immediately had no intention of ever going back to the site again. This is how you alienate your user: take away their control.

Would it be so hard for the homepage to offer a selection? Give me the option to view the site in a window? Perhaps even prepare me for the fact that the website will commandeer my desktop? What purpose does it serve to force a user to see the site in a specific manner? Does it help the client’s brand or does it help the creative team’s vision? Which is more important?

iPad

There has been talk about Apple’s new iPad where a lot of the grief comes from the fact that the device doesn’t support Adobe Flash. If I’m not mistaken, I believe everyone already recognizes that this device is meant only for consumption. It is a media consumption device that is not meant to produce media. This is why so many people are upset at Apple’s stance against Flash; it is an integral part of surfing the internet. That said, Flash is a plugin (read: “app”) whose features cannot be approved or disapproved by Apple. As it stands, Flash can do too many things and in a negative way for Apple.

• Users could play free Flash-based games rather than pay for them.
• Developers could build apps in Flash rather than on the iPhone platform.
• Apple cannot regulate the type of apps you use if these apps are Flash and located on a web page.
• Apple cannot regulate what new features Adobe decides to add into Flash.
• Flash can theoretically circumvent some iPhone/iPod/iPad security features.
• Flash developers could create interfaces that mimic and/or confuse –even trick—users.
• Flash is processor-intensive and might affect a user’s experience on the device.

Apple’s decision to ban Adobe Flash is definitely controversial. However, as a business and technical decision, it’s one that has been thought out very thoroughly. There are a lot of intelligent people at Apple and these decisions weren't made on a whim. Adobe, as with the rest of Apple users, can argue this out, the fact still remains: Flash can do too many things that can negative affect the iPhone experience.

(BTW, I still love my Blackberry)

Hacks

A coworker of mine recently sent me a link to a website that showcased what CSS is capable of doing in terms of mimicking Javascript rollovers and basic behaviours. Although the site did appear to work as stated, I opened up the source code to discover extraneous hidden HTML markup that littered the page. With this new information, I’d have to say that the CSS didn’t work as stated.

CSS is supposed to contain the presentation markup. Javascript holds the behavioural scripting. HTML holds the content. When CSS is used to replace Javascript by means of littering on the page content, this becomes a hack. Using HTML and CSS to create behavioural hacks to do what Javascript can easily do. It’s a cool concept to execute, a poor architecture for implementation.

Streaming media

Nintendo recently announced that they've partnered with NetFlix in order to stream on-demand movies from their Wii platform. I'm sure this deal with a lucrative one for Nintendo, but I can't help but think of it as an unsafe business move. With both Microsoft and Sony prepping to release their own motion-sensing peripherals, how will Nintendo stay competitive?

First and foremost, I would think that consoles need to be able to play games and play a large selection of games. I don't need my console to stream movies or produce a slideshow of my vacation photos or connect to the weather channel. I bought it because I want to play games. That said, what has Nintendo done to attract developers to their platform?

Both Sony and Microsoft have put a lot of time, effort and money into creating development tools and packages that give developers the ability to produce games. This is vital for a healthy development community. If there is a limited number of developers creating games for the Wii, there is a limited number of games.

And what is the value in buying a console when there aren't any good games for it?